Wikipedia: SuccessfulAgainst All Odds
Jos Damen (African Studies Centre, Leiden)
Librarian, ardent Wikipedian and project leader of
Wikipedians in Special Residence (with 12 Dutch heritage institutions)
Wikipedia for Grey Resources – Library of Congress, 2 May 2016
Wikipedia: overview
• Started January 15, 2001
• Name: Wiki (website type / “quick” (Hawaian) + encyclopedia
• Jimmy Wales and/vs. Larry Singer
• 2016: 290 language editions / 130,000 active editors
• Wiki-EN 5M articles, Wiki-SV 2M, Wiki-DE / NL 1,8M articles
• 18 billion page views per month, 500M unique visitors p.m.
• Only non-commercial website in top-10 popular websites
Criticism
• Not written by experts (“the lunatics have taken over the asylum”)
• Peer review by everyone
• Lack of accuracy
• Coherence & quality of writing
• Coverage of topics
• Vandalism
Success factors
• Free access
• Easy interface
• Google ranking
• Understandable language
• Mass (37M articles)
• Anyone can edit
• Clear structure / all edits visible
• Prizes (Erasmus Prize 2015) -> credibility
1 article, 100 versions
Images: Wikimedia Commons
31M “free” images
Wiki loves monuments 2015: 230,000 photos
Wikipedian in Residence & GLAM
• First Wikipedian in Residence (2010): British Museum
• 100. Wikipedian in Residence (2015/16): Bodleian Libraries
• Awareness, uploads, (much) more usage (x1000)
• GLAM-NL: 900,000 uploaded images(Dutch National Archives, Naturalis, Rijksmuseum, African Studies)
• Library of Congress: >70,000 images
(maps, National Photo Company, US FSA/OWI et al.)
• Wellcome Trust: >100,000 images
Mass uploads
Batch uploading, GLAMwiki toolset (importance of metadata)
2 examples NL:
• Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (480,000 images)
• Museum Naturalis (275,000 images)
More Wiki’s & copyright
• WikiSource (>1M books)
• WikiData (structured data, -> bots)
• Copyright: Creative Commons
• CC-BY-SA-4.0
The Story of the Anne Frank Picture
Anne Frank 1940 - Montessorischool, Niersstrraat 41-43, Amsterdam
• US copyright & Dutch copyright
• “photographer unknown”
• “published” vs. “made public”
• Anne Frank Foundation: Basel vs. Amsterdam
• Wikipedia: deletion request, but kept
Grey organizations & Wiki
• Look at related Wiki-entries -> facts, images, links
• Think about image donations
• Look at your own collection from the outside
• Beware of POV
• Respect copyright
• No link spam
Want to know more?• Wikipedians in Residencehttps://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence/nl
Jos Damen (African Studies Centre, Leiden) [email protected]